Invitation to the Human Rights Campaign: Stop the deportation of refugees from Chechnya!

On the 62nd anniversary of the collective deportation of the Chechnyan people (23rd February 1944) the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) commemorates the destruction of the Chechnyans in the year 1944 by Stalin with a vigil on the perimeter of the police security zone around the Lower Saxon parliament and is protesting against the deportation of Chechnyans today by the Minister of the Interior Uwe Schünemann.

In so doing the human rights organisation against Germany’s most inhuman minister of the interior, who lets the refugees from genocide from Chechnya be deported into the war zone or to Russia or threatens the children, women and men with deportation. In Russia too they are persecuted and forced to return to the Chechnyan war zone, like a refugee, who was deported from Lower Saxony on 17.01.2006 and who is now illegally in Chechnya and spends no two nights at the same house for fear of being arrested.

Together with refugees from Chechnya the international human rights organisation is protesting in front of the Ministry for Commerce, Labour and Traffic near the Lower Saxon Parliament building, Friedrichswall 1, from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.

During and after the Second World War 48 different religious and ethnic communities were deported by the then Soviet Union, and on 23.02.1944 the peoples of the Chechnyans and Ingush, which were related to each other. They were transported to central Asia. Tens of thousands of Chechnyan children, women and men – according to various estimates about one third of this small people – died during the deportation from hunger, cold and illnesses. The fate of the Chechnyans and Ingush was shared by above all the Crimea Tartars, the Karachai, Balkars and Meshketes, Kalmucks, Soviet Greeks, Far Eastern Koreans and the Russian Germans. In each case very many of these peoples were liquidated by these deportations, so that it is correct to speak of genocide according to the Convention of the United Nations of 1948 for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

The surviving Chechnyans were not allowed to return from their central Asian exile until more than ten years later. But under the rule of the Russian President Boris Yeltsin the policy of genocide against the Chechnyans was taken up once more. 80,000 people died between 1994 and 1996. Since 1999 another 80,000 will have been killed. All told this makes up some 20% of this small people. The past red-green German government made itself party to this guilt by various agreements with the Russian army, the sending of a delegation of the German secret service (BND) into the totally bombed-out Grosny and the political support of Putin.